Accusations of ungentlemanly behaviour are heavy-handed in the light of our
Ashes victory

Where should professional cricketers relieve themselves after they have had a beer or six? I have been scouring back numbers of Wisden, the bible of cricket, for an answer to what has become one of the burning questions of the English summer.

Like fracking and prospectively pregnant pandas, the issue refuses to go away. In fact, stories about desperate-for-the-loo cricketers have become almost as common as Australian batting collapses.

In July, it was reported that a well-oiled Sri Lankan cricketer on a flight from Gatwick to St Lucia had repeatedly tried to open the cabin door at 35,000 feet, mistaking it for the door of the lavatory. It was an honest mistake, so the player must be given the benefit of the doubt, but it was clearly not cricket, as it terrified his fellow passengers.

A month later, England Test star Monty Panesar was released by his county, Sussex, after an unsavoury incident in which he urinated on nightclub bouncers and was later fined by the police. This was even more clearly not cricket, and has left the reputation of a once-popular player in tatters.

An inglorious hat-trick was completed on Sunday night, when some members of the Ashes-winning England cricket team, celebrating on the outfield at the Oval, passed water in public, allegedly sprinkling the wicket itself, the holy of holies.

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The match had already been completed, of course, so even if the wicket had been affected by this novel approach to pitch preparation, it would not have given the England spinners an unfair advantage. But that has not stopped a cacophony of name-calling, mainly by Australian journalists who witnessed the incident and, having just seen their team lose the series 3-0, were naturally short of good-news stories to share back home.

We have been here before, of course. After England’s never-to-be-forgotten Ashes triumph in 2005, the team were entertained in the garden of 10 Downing Street, where it was widely reported – just an “urban myth”, according to the great man himself – that Freddie Flintoff had relieved himself in a flower bed.

As Flintoff had wrestled the Ashes from the Aussies more or less single-handedly, he could probably have relieved himself on the prime minister’s trouser leg and got away it, such was his standing with an adoring public. But the episode highlighted a recurring problem with our national game. On the pitch, our cricketers are demi-gods in white flannels; off it, they are accidents waiting to happen, particularly where there is drink involved.

Before Flintoff there was Denis Compton, the playboy-cricketer par excellence, who would turn up in the dressing-room in the morning still wearing his dinner jacket; and before Compton, there were the epic topers of the 19th century, when the Yorkshire cricket team was known, not without affection, as “10 drunks and a parson”.

Some of the heaviest drinking took place on tours of Australia, when the English visitors accepted the local hospitality on such a prodigious scale that one newspaper urged them to “resist the temptations held out to them”.

It is hardly an honourable or admirable tradition, but does it deserve the chorus of tut-tutting that has greeted the incident at the Oval? As a diehard cricket fan, I care passionately how England players conduct themselves on the pitch. When they let themselves down, as they have done repeatedly this summer with cynical time-wasting, I am the first to scream abuse at the television. But I cannot work myself up into a lather of indignation about what they get up to when stumps are drawn. Boys, ultimately, will be boys.

If professional cricketers cannot let their hair down in their hour of triumph, when can they? If the answer is “Never, because they are role models”, then professional cricket is no longer worth the candle: it is just another commercial industry run by bean-counters perpetually fretting about what the sponsors will think.

It is not every year we give the Aussies a drubbing on the cricket field. Cooky, Trotty, Belly, Rooty, Broady, Swanny and all have given me so much pleasure this summer that I can even forgive their inane nicknames. Any time they want to come around to my house, have a beer or two and water my geraniums, they would be most welcome.